*Covid-19 Update: This fall, the Library’s Evening with an Author series and related panels will continue to meet virtually, via Zoom. These events, which are free and open to the public, require advance sign up. Evenings with an Author programs begin at 19h30 (Central European Time). Please check eLibris or our programs calendar for updates and line-up.

Writers Reading during the Pandemic

Please join us for a special panel in which we’ll discuss reading in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. We’ll be joined by acclaimed authors Joyce Carol Oates, Edmund White, and Sheila Kohler, who will speak to us about what they have been reading and how it has shaped their response to the outbreak of the virus and resulting challenges, including illness, confinement and quarantine, isolation and loneliness, anxiety about the health of our loved ones, and frustration stemming from the responses of our leaders. We hope attending this event and listening to our panelists trade insights and perspectives might give you a chance to reflect upon how your own reading habits have changed throughout the course of 2020 as well. We believe books have the power not only to captivate, entertain, and instruct, but also to heal.

Please click here to register for this event.

Photo by Geraint Lewis

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Her most recent book, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, is out now.

Photo by Andrew Fladeboe

Edmund White has written thirty books, taught at Princeton and won many awards. He lives in New York City. His most recent novel, A Saint from Texas, is out now.

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Sheila Kohler is the author of over ten novels, three volumes of short fiction, a memoir, and many essays. Her most recent novel is Open Secrets, out now. Her memoir Once we were sisters is just out with Penguin as well as Canongate in England. She has won numerous prizes including the O.Henry twice and been included in Best American Short Stories most recently in 2013. Her work has been published in thirteen countries. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington and at Princeton since 2007. Her novel, Cracks was made into a film with directors Jordan and Ridley Scott with Eva Green playing Miss G. You can find her blog at Psychology Today under “Dreaming for Freud.”